


Ungraceful Things

by DesdemonaKaylose



Series: Strange and Ugly [1]
Category: Strange Magic (2015)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Human, F/M, First Meetings, Night Clubs, party girl Marianne
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-09
Updated: 2015-09-09
Packaged: 2018-04-19 16:58:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,651
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4754024
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DesdemonaKaylose/pseuds/DesdemonaKaylose
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The first time they meet, she is beautiful and he is absolutely out of his league. He won't remember it until much, much later.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ungraceful Things

**Author's Note:**

  * For [jacksbunne](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=jacksbunne).



The first thing he notices is her shoes. This is because he’s looking at the floor when she comes to stand in front of him, and it takes him more than a few seconds to realize she’s waiting to get his attention before he looks up. They must be three inches tall, and as someone who has worn heels before, he is impressed that anyone would try to dance in those. He follows the shape up to the last strap and thinks, _Alceme of the shapely ankles_ , with a weird reverence that’s roundabout appropriate considering he’s lapsed into thinking in ancient verse. He must never speak of this.

“…Hellooo?” the woman says, snapping her fingers just within his line of sight. “My eyes are up here,” she quips, in a voice that is the warm promise of mischief, the orange of a lit jack o’lantern.

He drags his gaze upward. She smiles at him. Her face is just a little pink, maybe with drink, and she is beautiful. It sticks in his throat, how absolutely gorgeous she is. What in the world could she want with a guy like him?

“I need a dance partner,” she says.

“Ah,” he says, pressing a finger to his chest, “you mean me?”

“Yes,” she says. “I mean you. Don’t scowl like that. Come one, the dance floor is empty and you’ve been trying to set that tile on fire with your death eye beams for hours.”

“I don’t _dance_ , party girl.”

She looks him up and down, from his tattooed forearms to his well worn boots, and she lifts her eyebrows in a _stunningly_ minimalist expression of scorn and disappointment. “Sitting next to the dance floor,” she says, “in a dance club.”

“ _Yes_ ,” he says, baring his teeth in what only the most generous might label a smile.

She rolls her eyes and spins the nearest chair around to face him, settling into it in a flick of tidy motions. She crosses her legs. “Then what _are_ you doing here?” she asks.

He glances over his shoulder before he can stop himself, scanning the room for one shape in particular. There’s a lull in the incessant motion of the dance floor right now—an unpopular song he would guess—but wherever she is, she’s not here anymore.

“Well I was _supposed_ to be a designated driver,” he says, more to himself than this nosy, pretty woman.

“Ditched, huh?” she replies, with such unassuming camaraderie that it trips him up entirely. She takes his silence for assent. “Well then, come forget your lame-o friends and dance with me.”

He gives her the most skeptical look he can produce, which he’s been told is Incredibly Skeptical Actually. She just leans forward. “Are you really gonna tell me,” she says, “you’ve _never ever_ danced a club before, not even once?

Bog presses his lips into a thin line. Actually he’s danced at this very club, once, on a night when they hung spider webs from the ceiling and submerged the room in cold blue lights. But he thinks it’s pretty telling that she can’t imagine a person who’s never done it, and he knows _plenty_ of people who haven’t.

“Not to this…” his lip curls, “…music.”

She points one small finger at him. “Oh,” she says, “you’re the snobby type.”

When all he does is deepen his scowl, the woman sighs. Some of the pep that had been buoying her seems to drain out in a faint slump. She rests her cheek on her palm.

“Okay, okay,” she says, “I’ll level with you. I kinda got ditched too. I’m trying to make the best of a really subpar night.” She pauses, distant. “This is what I get for agreeing to go out on a Thursday, I guess.”

She’s beautiful, and she’s got her cheek squished up under her eye like a modeling clay figure, and without the forced pep animating her he thinks he sees—he thinks there’s a ripple of something hard and strange underneath that surface, as alien to this bubbling brightly lit night club as the knobbed gable of a stone cathedral. Her nails are tipped with black.

“Maybe I could,” he starts, dragging a thumb over one eyebrow, “manage one song. Until my friend shows up again.”

The woman lights up in her jack o’lantern grin again, and this time he thinks that it must be a little too wide for a normal mouth, and his heartbeat stutters. She grabs his hand and pulls him up, stronger than he expected, and he allows himself to be manhandled onto the dance floor. She looks up, like a wolf sniffing the air for the scent of prey, and then she says, “A fast beat. Perfect.”

He’s been tapping vaguely, trying to get a feel for the rhythm, but when she twists into motion he loses all track of his own limbs and lungs. Her heels glide across the floor, spin, it’s not that she’s the best he’s ever seen—they pay dancers on those blue, cobwebbed nights, he’s seen some of the best—it’s that the way she moves is like a sword. She darts closer to him and he reacts, on instinct, dodging and reeling, and it’s in that flash of instinct that he finally catches the beat. She drives closer, he twists. She rebounds, he follows. She kicks up glitter from some forgotten floor show, catches his eye in a blaze of that glowing mischief, and throws herself. He catches. She is gone as fast as she arrived, rolling back off his open palms and out onto the open floor.

Bog honestly has no idea what she’s doing but he’ll die before he lets on that he’s desperately making it up as he races to catch up, bouncing off her manic prescience.  The song winds down into nothing and they pause, suspended in a parry, breathing heavily while trying to look like they’re not doing it. The next song fades in, unremarkable, and Bog couldn’t leave that stage now if he did want to. Her lips quirk up.

“Don’t you need to go wait for your friend?”

He twists an open palm, looks away. “Who needs friends when I have you?” he says, aiming for blasé and, he thinks, succeeding.

She grabs him by the waist and dips him—somehow—which strikes him as a very unnerving and dangerous thing to do to a man who is at least a foot taller than you. His lungs nearly collapse on the gasp his body forces up. She swings his weight back up and steps back, her grin twitching and then collapsing in on itself. She brushes off his shirt, flecks of loose glitter spiraling from her nervous fingers. He doesn’t understand why that split second out of all split seconds made her smile die like that.

“It’s hard to get a dance partner,” she admits belatedly. “I’ve got a tendency to wallop people with my elbows.” She pulls one back, demonstrating the wicked bone underneath her skin. Honestly he’s been hit with worse.

“I don’t think I got any of that,” he says, eyeing the joint. “This time anyhow.”

“Well,” she says, “there’s always round two.”

Round two quickly becomes round three, and then Bog entirely loses track of the music. It doesn’t matter, it’s awful and he doesn’t care, they could be playing ambient train track recordings and he wouldn’t mind as long as it had a beat. What matters is the fleck of glitter sweat-pasted below auburn hair, the stomp of three inch heels, his hand and her hand meeting as they balance on an ill-timed and overly ambitious move. They don’t stop until the DJ breaks the song to announce something about gift cards, and they stand shaking slightly with exertion as the man in the booth warbles on in a language that Bog was certain he understood a few minutes ago. Now it all just sounds like reverb.

He opens his mouth to say something but—thankfully, because it was probably going to be stupid—a shout from the sidelines interrupts him. They both turn, blinking owlishly in the stage light at the petite shape of a blond girl hovering near the edge of the floor. She waves pretty insistently at the woman beside him. She’s just the kind of pixie cute creature that he’d expected to see out tonight, and he has to shake himself when he realizes his dance partner is waving back. The weapon is sheathed, the architecture is submerged, and it’s a little bit dizzying to remember that this woman who danced with him—danced with _him_ —is not from his world at all. She glitters and sparkles like everything else tonight, shiny, as she waves back at this stranger. It’s as if a switch has been flipped.

“That’s my sister,” she tells him, still a little breathless as she looks up. “Come on, I’ll introduce you.”

“Ahh _h_ ,” he says, feeling his accent slipping through heavier, “I’m not sure about—”

She grabs his arm, laughing, and pulls him along. He can’t resist the inexorable tug anymore than a rip tide dragging him out to drown. There’s a merry brightness about her that renders whatever physical strength he has void, even as his trainers are practically scuffed along the floor towards this glitter-happy doom.

“Dawn!” she shouts, “I thought you left!”

Dawn, all blue eyeliner and carefully disheveled hair, does a sheepish little roll of her head. “Yeaaaah,” she says, “turns out that guy was a major buzz kill. I had Sunny walk me back. Who’s, uh, who’s _that._ ”

Dawn looks at him like he’s a weed that’s sprung up in her private flower beds—it’s not malevolent, but Bog recoils under the withering dismissal of it all.

Her sister’s smile dims. “This is—” she starts, and then she looks up.

“Bog,” he says, because if this delicate creature is going to look at him like a stain on her skirt, he might as well give her all of it. There’s no point in trying to pretty it up with his birth name now.

Dawn attempts a smile. “That’s—” _hideous_ , yes, he knows “—unusual.”

“Um, so, Dawn, do you—are you done for the night? You’re probably done for the night, right?”

“Oh, Marianne, don’t be such a _downer_ , what, are you tired already?”

Marianne looks lost, and Bog doesn’t blame her. She’s about as far from a downer as he’s seen in his life, and he’s not sure he wants to know what kind of standard this sister of hers is comparing against.

“No, I’m,” Marianne says, biting out a nervous laugh, “I’m fine. I’ll just. Be here. If you need me.”

That seems to be all Dawn needed to hear. She bounces off twice as cheerful, blowing a kiss to Marianne as she disappears into the crowd. She does shimmer in her own way, like a permanent spotlight is fixed on her as she goes. She’s beautiful too. Beautiful and peculiarly powerful, and he can’t bring himself to resent her for knowing where on the scale of the world he rests in comparison. He is what he is. And she, certainly, is what she is as well.

“I’m supposed to be watching her,” Marianne murmurs, sounding more tired than anything else. “Fat chance of that.”

Bog glances at her, at her grimly flat lips, and thinks that she must have it too, the dim resignation he’s feeling. He recognizes it. It resonates in him, even though he can’t imagine why a woman as beautiful and capable and entrancing as this Marianne would feel it. Her sister struck some kind of untuned cord in her, vibrating her right out of harmony with this place and these people. She opens and closes a fist, as if she’s trying to get something back under control. It disturbs him in a way that Dawn’s barely concealed disapproval never could.

He gnaws his lip for a moment, and then schools his features into a familiar coolness. He takes her hands, gently, and turns her back towards him. “Do you even know how beautiful you are?” he asks.

Marianne turns stone hard in his grip. The bow of her lips falls flat. “Yes,” she says. It isn’t as though her voice drops in measurable degrees, but he knows instinctively that he’s made a terrible mistake somewhere. “I do. You know what, I’ve got—I’ve got a couple people I haven’t said hi to yet, I should—”

He grabs at her hand as she pulls it away. It’s instinctual, it’s more physical than most people would stand for but part of him thinks, hopes, that she understands this language the way he does. He gets his hand around her wrist as she’s turning away, notices how small her bones are underneath his grip.

“Wait,” he says, “I thought—”

“I think we both know what you thought.”

“I only meant…”

She looks him up and down, following the line of his grasping hand up to his face. He feels the familiar flush of shame rising up under his skin— _not much to look at_ , he thinks, in a flash of resentment that fizzles as soon as it comes. He lets go. Marianne drops her hand slowly, as if the hard scrutiny she’s putting him under is taking up nearly all of her processing power.

“I know I’m pretty,” she says. “Being pretty has never been my problem.”

 _What else is there_ , he wants to ask. But he’s seeing that strange forbidding architecture rise above the surface again, a cold strangeness where the edge of her meets this bright, simple room. He thinks that would be a very dangerous question to ask.

“What… is?” he asks instead, riding the razor blade of that question like a tongue over teeth.

She closes her hands. The music is pounding with something asymmetrical and electronic, alien, and the bar is lit up in the strangest shade of cold blue behind her. “I don’t know,” she says, dismissive, “maybe it’s nosy guys who want to score out of their league.”

Bog trips on an involuntary step back. Oh. Oh but sure, of course. She’s not blind, is she? He’d been stupid to think she’d somehow failed to notice his ungraceful features and awkward lurking and lingering uncertainty. He draws back, flattening his expression into a scowl that lets nothing through.

“Apologies,” he grits out, “for wasting your time, party girl. Enjoy the rest of your evening.”

He leaves–he texts his passenger from the parking lot and waits on the hood of his truck, chin on knee, until the music clicks off inside the heart of that smoky blossom and the people begin to flitter out. He tracks her through the crowd, leaning on the shoulder of some blond man he’s never seen before. She doesn’t look happy. 

Regrets and resentment follow him down the highway and into the darkness, overpowering even the human press of the woman in the passenger seat. This woman is not his girlfriend, but she could be. Or at least he had thought so. Now he wonders if anyone could ever love him, really, a creature as repellent as him. 

The next time he meets Marianne, she’s changed herself so utterly that it isn’t until she takes a swing at him that the memory clicks. She moves like a weapon. If she remembers him at all, it doesn’t seem to matter.

This, he thinks, must be the ungraceful thing that lurked underneath her skin. This blazing ferocity underneath all that pep and bubble, this strangeness. He can barely block her blows his mind is racing so quickly. Resonance races through him where her powerful fists rattle their packs of pressure into his bones. Recognition, in spite of everything he knows, of a creature somehow like him. Who is she?

 _What_ is she?


End file.
